Unpatriotic Teenage Shooting Victims Continue to Thwart the Constitutional Rights of Joe the Plumb

A stronger revision of a piece I posted here last spring. This version, which differs from prior drafts in that I didn't fall asleep at the keyboard, is finally the final draft.

 

Unpatriotic Teenage Shooting Victims
Continue to Thwart
the Constitutional Rights of Joe the Plumber

by

Seth Cason

 

 

And every year now like Christmas

some boy gets the milk-fed suburban blues

reaches for the available arsenal

and saunters off to make the news,

 

                       --Ani DiFranco

 

 

 

     He’s healthy, well-liked, and unassuming. The world doesn’t know his name, but each day he draws closer to the opportunity, the exciting possibility of knowing the world. How many people does one meet in a lifetime? How many ways do they change and grow through one another? This morning, Valentine’s Day, he walks into his high school carrying a brilliant bouquet of flowers for his girlfriend. He’s athletic, smart, his adventurous and extraordinary destiny is not one he’ll take for granted. And now, he’s discovered a passion for writing; he’s got talent, he has the knack. His favorite class is creative writing, He’s there now, in that classroom on the third floor on this Valentine’s Day, and when the fire alarm goes off, like everyone else he leaves his seat and steps into the crowded hall.

     His signature photo has become an archived default, the front page of a legacy most of us will never know. It’s where the impact is most visceral. His face is the strike of lightning that blasts the same place twice, three times, four, five; it’s the boxer’s upper-cut that connects with your jaw. You turn around, glance back, another connection. But nothing in this world is immortal, no one is exempt from the laws of physics, gravity, diminishing returns. For now he’s a supernova, he’s coursing away at light speed, and he cannot halt and return home any more than we can reach, jump, secure our grip around his ankle and never let him go. 

     Joaquin Oliver is seventeen years-old. He’s a fusion of strength and serenity, standing snug and bundled in the foreground of a winter beach, a black knitted skullcap concealing what may still have been the same shock of artificial blonde hair as in his other candid senior year photos. Here, even in this close-up his posture is obvious, powerful but relaxed, conjuring an uncomplicated stoicism that’s upstaged and undermined by the extraordinary noise inside his eyes. You can’t listen, you can only look closer, through a magnifying glass or a chem lab microscope, and then you’d see the cosmos as through an observatory telescope, the traffic jams of planets, galaxy clusters giving chase, collision, and rebirth after rebirth; the upset of orbits, an impossible turbulence of color, all frozen in time, incorporated, and composed without a blur.

     A Venezuelan immigrant who came to this country with his family as a toddler, Joaquin would have graduated from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas only a few months after that day at the beach.

     Just a year earlier when he and his family finally became United States citizens. Joaquin wasted no time in exclaiming on Instagram : “Mama, we made it!”

 

 

 

      I can only stare, the cogs and wheels of my brain slump over, melted like a Salvador Dali nightmare. I stare, like he’s an equation I lack the capacity to solve, yet everything hinges on the solution. I’m determined, possibly programmed to scour for answers, for patterns and truths. It’s a futile chase. All I see is a handsome, much loved young man who can’t possibly know that within a matter of days his dreams and plans, his secrets, his volumes of stories and the quiet wildness in his eyes, will be obliterated.

     And like those who’ve gone before him, Hadiya Pendleton, the 15 year-old honor student who performed with her high school band at President Obama’s second inauguration; Danny Parmertor, a 16 year-old Ohio student whose brother said “would have changed the world;” 6 year-old Noah Pozner, one of twenty 1^st graders gunned down in Newtown who, like Joaquin, will exist only as a finite photograph for the rest of his twin sister’s life just to name a few of the tens of thousands of Americans extinguished each year to appease the insecurities of craven open-carry lunatics Joaquin’s death will not be necessary. It won’t be an unavoidable crash or a speeding meteor that’s impossible to dodge. It will be senseless, and it will ripple outward wounding everything it touches.

     Reasons? There are more than a few, all twisted into one impossible knot. Take them to a chem lab and boil them down to their single most prominent element, and you’ll never guess what you'll find: 

              $$$$$                                                  

                                     

                                 

 

“Look at where the profits are, that’s how you’ll find the source….

They’re gonna make a pretty penny,

and then they’re all going to hell.”

 

                                     -----Ani DiFranco                         

 

 

 

     Does the fragility of life, the impudent, indiscriminate slaughter we’ve come to witness daily ultimately elevate and strengthen our perception of this human existence, or does the constant worldwide onslaught diminish it, reducing us equally to the status of animals? If he exists, God has proven that he doesn’t play favorites. No one is exempt. Whether it be church congregations mowed down by radicalized bigots or wedding guests perishing at the hands of an uninvited suicide bomber, the senselessness takes a heavy toll not just on our identity, but on our perception of reality itself. Culture is not a static concept. It’s in constant yet subtle flux, but we humans are remarkably skilled at adapting, particularly if our survival hinges upon it.

     Since the 2016 election, more than a few of my friends and family, as well as waiting room strangers, train passengers, checkout-line customers, a diverse sampling of 21^st Century Americans with whom I’ve spoken when not eavesdropping, have admitted to either temporary abstinence from all forms of news and social media or, on the understandable extreme, an unyielding and permanent renunciation from the miracle of unlimited data for the sake of their survival, their psychological and physical wholeness.

     But fortitude of that caliber is anything but abundant among our species and eventually we cave to our curiosity, to our gluttony for undeserved punishment. Exhausted, we flop down and adapt to life inside a warzone. How many mornings have you opened your laptop, your phone, your tablet, the television that someone thought was ingenious to embed into your refrigerator, and you grimace and gag through your daily news sites until you see it. You weren’t expecting it. Mechanically, you stop.

     Once you’ve seen it, it’s too late. You may have forgotten, but there to remind you is that disingenuously drab headline that sprouts verbatim almost everywhere exactly two days after only the most publicized incidents, the headline that blasts a cold shockwave down your spine, makes your insides feel a hundred pounds heavier and prompts your reasoning skills to call in sick.

     It’s over twenty years old. but that headline triggers a sickening paralysis in those who can’t click, scroll, or distract themselves fast enough, as well as those who, like me, hover for a while, preparing, driven by the need to know, the need to see and thereby attempt to make sense of the senseless.

     By now, I can’t help but wonder if we’ve all become collectively, uncomfortably numb to that headline , its uninspired words, differing only in city and state, pushed to the bottom of the page like a Montenegro prime minister by the absurdity of Trump’s latest Twitter tantrum.

 

 

             These are the victims of the _______ _______ shootings.

 

 

     A few months ago, when I first started dabbling with YouTube clips of Glee, I came across the late Naya Rivera’s tribute to Corey Monteith, a major cast member who had died of an overdose before the taping of the fifth season. After a rapid, irreverent introduction, she stood before her fellow cast members and began singing “If I Die Young,” a song that was new to me. Its lyrics invoke implications of not only consciousness beyond death, but of a worldly afterlife, a theory that in my Catholic school youth I’d have never questioned.

     It’s a heart-crusher of a song and a scene, addressing an impenetrable mystery, a code I cannot crack. What does it mean to die young for any reason? We take the future for granted, sometimes we’re resentful, dreading everything. But what if your pulse, your breath, your plans, all the love that stabs at your heart were suddenly annihilated, forever?

     What can we glean, if anything, from death that will help demystify the mystery of life?

 

 

    

     The morning after the shootings in Parkland I was sitting in one of a long line of swivel chairs facing the wall-to-wall mirror inside a generic mass-market men’s barber shop, a place best described by a word that eludes me the harder I hunt it down, but essentially it’s the opposite of “metro-sexual.”

     On the television attached to the wall in the upper corner, news crews and anchors and experts were covering the shootings rather than Trump’s daily b***h-fit. As expected, someone in the shop launches their best Ann Coulter/ bayou backwoods impression, one that I’m certain was never rehearsed. Lucky day: it was the old man to my left. As frustrated as a first grader forced to finish an SAT test, he  huffed and mumbled while the unamused stylist retreated to her safe place while mechanically clipping the remains of his white hair. “Crazy!” he said, fidgeting in his seat, fumbling for a foundation.. “Guns ain’t never killed nobody! You cain’t… like… arrgh.”

     Quite the doctor of rhetoric, he was casting his reel over the side of the boat hoping anything would bite, an argument or an agreement, an engagement of any kind no matter how inarticulate his grumblings of indignation. I could care less where he came from or why the violent loss of seventeen lives didn’t bother him in the least. I simply basked in his frustration at being ignored.

     But the reality he kept smothered beneath multiple layers of excuses spoke for itself. This man was afraid. Not of becoming a victim, but afraid that after this massacre, as has been the case after every gun massacre, a mysterious deployment of ghosts, maybe, or a super-secret SWAT team composed of genetically modified talking cats, someone, anyone, would be knocking on his door later that day to seize all of his guns and firearm paraphernalia.

     And the only fear more disabling? The fear that it would never happen.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

     In the aftermath of the massacre Emma Gonzalez, as well as her classmates who’d narrowly survived the violence, became the heroes, the voices of righteous and unswerving dissent to an exhausted, hopeless country that in the past, even after the shootings at Newtown, the Pulse nightclub, and other schools, mosques, temples, and churches from Texas to New Zealand, could do nothing but pray, and even that proved useless once the world saw this latest handful of student activists gathered around the oval office in front of the former President, a stable genius who made no show of concealing the “How to be Human” crib notes drafted just minutes earlier by a harried underling.

      And the moneyed, hellbound ghouls of the NRA threw up their hands, licked clean of blood, and in true Pavlovian fashion attacked their critics and anyone else who dared threaten their heaping coffers, even a group of teenagers who’d narrowly dodged a barrage of bullets in their own school while watching people they’d known for years, if not most of their lives, fall indiscriminately all around them.

     Shortly afterwards that handful of survivors multiplied into the tens of thousands of students who graduated overnight into demonstrators, protesters who walked out of their schools despite authoritative repercussions. Emma organized the March for our Lives protest where, upon taking the podium, she closed her eyes and stood in silence, as did the rest of the sweeping crowd, for over six minutes, the duration of the shooting spree at Marjorie Stone Douglas.

     If I could afford to rent a reliable time machine, I’d love to be part of that moment. I was so proud of them. I’d love to be the one to tell them that, in the near future, as of this writing, the NRA has gone belly up and LaPierre, last seen shooting elephants in what may have been the same poach-park frequented by the Trump brothers, is praying for a new Texas home to a God he assumes is rather fond of him.

 

                                     

 

     How righteous and merciful would our world be if we could legally kidnap, tar. and feather those b******s from the annals of recent history who’ve thwarted all preventative gun violence legislation in a scheme to further enrich themselves to such preposterous heights as to inspire comic relief to anyone who can’t see, in broad shameless daylight, that they’re damned, soaked in the gleaming blood and brain matter of tens of thousands of Americans who essentially died for that express purpose, to sustain the luxurious lifestyles of a handful of people whose names we’ll never know, who’ll never feel an inkling of remorse whether or not they connect the dots.     

     Children are literally being shredded because of their pocket-lining policies. Black men are shot to death in the back or in department stores or park benches while these imbeciles emerge onstage to thunderous cheers and applause at conservative conventions for the rifle they hold above their heads en route to the podium, and anyone who objects or protests such injustice is immediately labeled a terrorist.

     But we know all about them, how they won’t listen, they won’t change. We’re assured by our journalists and bloggers and maybe a few congressional leaders that history will condemn them by way of Matthew Hopkins or Cotton Mather and that there will come a time, assuming the human race survives to produce future generations, when every school-kid will groan, boo, or hiss at the sound of their names.

     Utter bullshit. Nobody will remember their names, assuming this planet will still accommodate lifeforms that remember anything.

 

 

 

 

     It’s not a crisis that’s unique to America. Ordinary citizens, especially in Central America, are trapped, terrorized, and quite often gunned down should word of an insurgent reach the acting authoritarian dictator, who won’t hesitate to order the entire family of a single dissenter executed. Someone lecture the good pastor about that.

     So parents, after weighing the odds, decide that a sweltering cross-country trek by any means necessary is safer than staying at home, because no matter what these terrified children find once their stowaway train grinds to a stop across Mexico’s northern border, nothing could be worse than the death and rubble of their homeland.

     The United States is their only hope. And Donald Trump, after an illustrated crayon briefing prepared by his Legion of Doom from their headquarters beneath the muck of an un-drained swamp, not only sabotaged that hope but turned it into a nightmare.

     But somewhere, possibly in Two-Corinthians, it is written: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me.” Delighted, the Trump administration and its task force dismissed the second half of that verse and built concentration camps and enforced policies that knowingly, forcefully, and shamelessly separated hundreds of children from their parents, some permanently.

     “Bad hombres,” our former President Spanglish’d at us. Meanwhile, his supporters desecrated Jewish cemeteries, pissed on homeless people, and murdered their civilian political enemies by plowing their cars into crowds of protesters.

 

 

                                                                                                                 A couple of years ago, when the violence and destruction of Aleppo was making international news, one publication ran a chilling, illustrated piece covering one by one the stories of five Syrian children who sustained fatal injuries from bombs, shrapnel, or poisonous gas while inside their own homes with their families. The first photograph showed a team of doctors surrounding a bloody, unconscious toddler, and that was all I could take. I signed off, veered away from that site like a car swerving to avoid a moose, or in my case, a gaping black hole of guilt.

     Guilt for backtracking, rewinding, hoping to record over that sickening image. Guilt over my cowardice, for fretting over my shattered comfort zone. And of course survivor’s guilt of American privilege. Looking at those photographs sparks a chemical reaction, that same equation that’s impossible to solve, probably because there’s no answer.

     But each time that blunt and tiresome headline surfaces amidst each aftermath, my resistance clicks on, as does, in my own way, the need to approach the casket and peer inside. Strangely enough, after the Pulse nightclub shootings my research into the identities of the victims was aggressive and spontaneous, its immediacy attributable-- I’m guessing-- to my being a gay man, and I mourned, paced in frustration, concentrating on what they must have been thinking: “Why me? What did I do?”

     My cursor hovers over the headline like an airplane circling in search of a parking space. My resistance, under the guise of good sense, suggests I do some pull-ups, maybe catch up on my digital comics subscriptions. I ask myself, my bad but common sense, what the hell I expect to glean from this. I have to prepare, to make sure; already I’m trembling. When it’s time I just go for it, wishing instantly that I hadn’t.

     Within seconds I’m face to face Joaquin Oliver for the first time.

 

 

 

If guns are regulated,
well we're on a slippery slope,
to common sense and public safety, 
reason, peace and hope

                --Roy Zimmerman

         

 

     For many of us, home life during our teen years was often one sponsor short of a cage match, but for Joachin, his mother was “his rock,” which is why I think of him each time I hear the first verse:’

 

Lord, make me a rainbow
I’ll shine down on my mother
She’ll know I’m safe with you
When she stands under my colors

 

     The song, however, blurs the lines between life and death, heaven and earth. In our haste to exact justice, restore equilibrium while trapped inside America’s hopelessly impossible gun culture, we find comfort in believing that the victims were compensated with eternal peace and joy, as we would with any departed loved ones.

     I still hold on to a sliver of such hope even though I’ve gravitated toward “non-believer” status. When those that I hold dear begin to pass, I’ll no doubt adopt the same fallacy, that they’re dead but alive in the paradise that Jesus promised. No hassles, no stress, no worries. No change, no growth, no purpose.    

 

 

     Believe what you will believe.

     I don’t know what to believe.

     And should we disagree, we’ve amassed enough evidence in social sciences these past few years to at least walk away with a few ounces of common ground, which doesn’t amount to a hill of baked beans if one party lapses into the convenience of psychotic denial. For years, they’ve believed with all the passion of a religious fanatic that no, it’s a not a sleazy NRA slush fund scam, the government really is coming for everyone’s guns. Oh, what the... "HOT DAMN the black guy’s gone. Now there ain’t nothin’ in Washington except old greedy white slobs and young greedy white bimbos. My guns are safe!"

     Immediately, the NRA started hemorrhaging cash.    

 

         

     Once, I was a believer.

     But inevitably, hard arctic logic crashed like a fallen tree in the middle of my road to Mass, and now I can do nothing but marvel at the horror, the unapologetic unfairness coursing like dark matter through the human experience. If this consciousness and this world are all we have, there’s no greater abomination than robbing someone of their life, thus robbing others of the chance to say goodbye and still others the opportunity  Like all of us, the odds of Joaquin ever entering existence in the first place were one in 400 quadrillion.

     And that infuriates me more than anything. The atrocity of an eager young life exterminated and left to die where it fell. There’s nothing I can write about him, or Cassie, Rachel, or Trayvon or Danny or anyone that will do them justice; the best I’ve got is that this did not have to happen. They did not have to fund Joe the Plumber’s pathetic weakling firearms fetish with their lives, nor did their friends, families, and those victims who survived, all of whom will suffer trauma and loss for the rest of their days.

     But there’s one thing I found that I still keep, that shatters the barricades of my cynicism and hopelessness, reminding me that my responsibility isn’t to grieve over or dwell upon the world’s brutality but rather, for the time being, to know where I stand and who I’ll stand up for. And what I found is a photograph from an article I came across about two years ago, one that I bring up when I lose perspective, when misanthropy sweeps like a disease through my good sense, swift on convincing me that it is my better sense.

     The Syrian refugees photographed here have survived a dangerous, horrifying journey and, miraculously, have landed on the island of Lesbos where they are welcomed, even physically lifted onto steady ground by Greek military and volunteers.

     It’s over,” the boy is thinking. Although they’ll face plenty of new hardships upon setting foot on land, this moment captures the end of by the longest but hardly the cruelest trauma they’ve survived. They’ve lost their homes, their friends and family, their possessions and their identities everything except each other. A kaleidoscope of a hundred congested emotions converges through the boy’s tears; that they are hated, that people they’ve never met want them dead for reasons that have nothing to do with anything they’ve done, how could the probability of death not proven welcoming? He can’t believe they survived, that, although they were left with nothing, hope prevailed. It’s over. It’s just beginning.

     “We’re safe,” his disbelief veering into shock. “It’s over. We made it.”

 

And if I hear one more time

about a fool’s right

to his tools of rage,

I’m gonna take all my friends,

and we’re gonna move to Canada,

and we’ll die of old age.

 

                    --Ani DiFranco

                    “To the Teeth”

 

 

Reviews

[barleygirl]

About 50% of this is of the caliber that one might find published in New Yorker magazine. I've never said that to any writer. The first quarter seems to drag, maybe too persnickety in trying to be clever . . . your cleverness is often well-executed, but a steady stream of it can get exhausting . . . it sorta seemed thru the first part that you weren't getting to any kind of a point.

Then, as this piece continues on thru-out, you still really don't focus on a point, but all your points are so well in focus (individually) & so well aligned, it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that you become "on fire" at about the 25%-thru point & that's when this thing gets into the New Yorker stratosphere.

Even that cosmic cruise isn't without dips when you layer on a few too many prepositional phrases in your fervor to indict. A good editor could prune & straighten it out to where it would sparkle like a meteor.

Despite these comments about the effectiveness of the construction, this remains one of the most powerful pieces I've read about how s****y life seems to go these days (years) & how little anyone seems to be doing about it.

The gun biz seems to be a jumping off point, basically, & then you go ballistic on every piece of s**t policy we've endured in a downward spiral of gov't dysfunction & politician audacity/dishonesty.

At times, I felt this was starting to feel a little like an anti-Trump rant, which is unfortunate becuz (1) nobody wants to relive that s**t and (2) nobody wants to litigate it for the umpteenth time and (3) every administration has its skeletons (even tho Trump was a phenom case of slime). Still, whenever you jump on the Trump train going in whichever direction, you're going to get about half the US population blowing your writing off. To me, it's not worth it. Having some last say on Trump just isn't worth it.

Sure it was nightmarish to be part of the so-called civilization you describe so eloquently & caustically (simultaneously), but what are you suggesting as a step in a better direction?

Or maybe I missed that, since, toward the end, when you got onto Aleppo, I OD'ed & could not focus on anymore blood & gore, compliments of the US gov't. Anyhow, it's exhilarating for all of us to relive this s**t the same way some relive the holocaust. Your cleverness is delightfully condemning. It's a kick to read. But I'm so so so sick of rehashing the broken state of our reality. I'm so so so ready to hear someone with some constructive ideas (((HUGS)))

[Seth Cason]

Barleygirl-- I'm sorry to respond so late, but from the bloody bottom of my heart I thank you. Of course I love the compliments, and reading that you find this even 50% New Yorker material is probably the most monumental compliment I have ever received, but I appreciate and NEED your editorial eagle eye criticism-- it's the best way to improve. I receive it gratefully, and I want to thank you for taking the time to review this.

[barleygirl]

My pleasure to read you. I quit the cafe (again . . . once & for all?) . . . so prolly won't be touching bases with you again for a long time. Here's wishing you the very best with your sharp writer's wit & sensibilities! (((HUGS)))

[Seth Cason]

Take care, thank you for all your help. I've learned more from your honest a*s-kicking than any of the billion writing reference books cluttering my shelves in dusty impotence. You are an ingenious wordsmith and I hope one day you'll resurface. Until then I wish you the best.

[barleygirl]

Whoa! My ego just leaped up & twirled! I'm getting noticed on other writing websites. Got asked to be main editor for a major publication, but turned it down to stay true & dedicated to my art (which has been burning up lately) *wink! wink!* Happy Holidays (((HUGS)))

[Seth Cason]

I know you've left, vanished into the fabled wilderness of mythical dimensions like the 100 Acre Wood, possibly even Delaware, but in my head I've been rolling around your reactions and suggestions and I understand what you've said. I definitely intend to triage this piece one day, but I realize right now it's still too close, it hasn't cooked down and evaporated out of my brain, and sometimes rolling it around in my head I feel like Sisyphus straining to roll a dozen of those gassy purple blimp girls from Willy Wonka up Mt. Everest. One day soon I'll polish it like a boss, I'll know when I'm ready. I hope you're well and enjoying the happiest of trails, a regular Jackie Kerouac minus (hopefully) the booze and benzedrine. Take care.

[Seth Cason]

Oh-- and congrats on those new opportunities! I'm not the least bit surprised that editorial Trojan wars are breaking out all around you and you are the new Helen. Bravo!

[lightsong]

much much much better, shorter, more focused (obviously You didn't sleep on the keyboard ;)), the last time was like all your feelings were juggling while You were writing (this happens when we write something very sensitive to us and we connected deeply to it, all our emotions will overflow like waterfalls all over the place) this time they are still intense but in order, clear and organized. not defending Trump but there is a main reason why he stopped migration from Mexico which we are not discussing here because what matters only is your main important message.

I told You the last time my opinion about medias (oh and the evil smartphones!!!) TV all are sucker of our energies, "Think outside the box" is the key dear Seth, the situation is more larger, more complicated, when the crises started here and I couldn't make sense of what it was senseless, eventually I came up with this "in wars there is no logic" yes if You think more into this You will know what I mean, apply it to now, later, then, all what was happening and happening now and will happen. there is this small group (and it's getting larger) who believe they are Gods on earth and all other humans are servants, no exception, man, woman, black, white, gay, straight, Christian, Muslims, American, Russian... etc, they have a plan for each. do You remember my question to You about Kurt? (poor Kurt we always forget him), what he lacked is Faith dear Seth, Faith... nothing else. don't lose it if You do it means they got You and You are weak under them, I am not telling You to be religious or Christian, that's not my place, I am speaking of Faith what ever your Faith is to be.

I know this one You worked so hard on and it was hard, painful and pulled your emotions and drained You, but the sincerity You ended with worth it all, so I am extending many warm faithful Hugs*** to You*